... the Party continued to play a significant role in the growth of labour militancy. Symbolised by Harold Wilson, a nominal 'left-winger' becoming Prime Minister in 1964, this perceptible shift to the left alarmed one group in particular, the professional anti-communist network in Britain, at the heart of which was the Information Research Department (IRD). For a supposedly secret agency, we now know quite a bit about IRD - certainly a great deal more than we did in 1978 when the organisation was closed. IRD finally got partly exposed because of its curious position of working with the intelligence services, but not for them; of being part of the Foreign Office but ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 11) April 1986 Last | Contents | Next Issue 11 Wilson, MI5 and the Rise of Thatcher Covert Operations in British Politics 1974-1978 Appendix 1: ISC, FWF, IRD The origins of the Institute for the Study of Conflict go back to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) which was set up in West Berlin in 1950 as the CIA's major cultural offensive during the cold war. (1 ) CCF is believed to have originated in the fertile mind of Frank Wisner of the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC) which later became the CIA's covert Directorate of Plans. ...

... Issue 37 Britain's Secret Propaganda War Paul Lashmar and James Oliver Sutton Publishing, Stroud (UK) 25.00 hb This is a really interesting and important book - perhaps the most important book about the British secret state since Fitzgerald and Bloch's British Intelligence and Covert Action in the early 1980s. The incremental uncovering of the Information Research Department (IRD) story has been one of the continuing threads of British parapolitics since Richard Fletcher's pioneering work on it in the mid 1970s; and for several years now a synthesis of all the extant material on IRD has been waiting to be done. But Lashmar and Oliver have gone way beyond that. Although that existing material has been digested, ...

... oriented newspaper, The Democrat.... 'worked unofficially on Socialist Commentary .. .. .and became a founder member of its offshoot, the Socialist Union, which served as a think tank for the emerging Gaitskellite wing of the Labour Party..... 'liaised, advised, wrote, lectured, published – and helped IRD [the Information Research Department] with the distribution of one of their early publications, The Curtain Falls. '39 36 Kaiser p. 113. 'The labor attaché...had...an unusual opportunity to enhance American influence among individuals and institutions that historically have no contact with U.S . diplomatic missions. ' ...

... not clear how successful they were. For all this anti-Labour propaganda, Labour's total vote went up in the 1951 General Election. The Information Research Department In the labour movement the Trades Union Congress was working with the newly-formed, Foreign Office-based, political warfare executive, operating under cover as the Information Research Department (IRD), in an anti-communist drive. IRD was not an innovation. British politics since World War 1 is studded with clandestine propaganda operations involving the mass media of the day. The claims of massive post-World War 2 media penetration by Aims of Industry and the Economic League are reminiscent of the operations of the post World ...

... Features: travelled to Africa and the Persian Gulf to investigate terrorist and other threats to petroleum shipments coming to Europe and the Americas - Benton's oil study contains a detailed breakdown of Soviet intelligence personnel in Africa: wrote ISC Conflict Studies: author of espionage/thriller novels. CLIVE Nigel: Long career in MI6: one-time head of IRD(1968-70): wrote for ISC and recently ISC editorial consultant. CLUTTERBUCK Richard: Expert on counter-insurgency: WW2 served in Western desert and Italy: Palestine 1947, Malaya 1956, Singapore 1966: instructor at British and US Army staff colleges: chief army instructor, Royal College of Defence Studies (1971-72 ...

... (c ) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 38) Winter 1999 Last | Contents | Next Issue 38 George Orwell and the IRD John Newsinger In their recent history of the Information Research Department (IRD), Paul Lashmar and James Oliver discuss George Orwell's decision to collaborate with that organisation's anti-Communist propaganda operations. They write that 'George Orwell's reputation as a left-wing icon took a body blow from which it may never recover when it was revealed in 1996 that he had cooperated closely with the IRD's Cold Warriors, even offering his own blacklist of eighty-six Communist fellow-travellers... '( 1 ) This echoed the ...

... hb) 25. Christopher Mayhew died recently thinking he set up the Information Research Department. As I have shown elsewhere, he was throughly manipulated by the Foreign Office - just like his boss at the time, Ernest Bevin, come to that. This short (142 pages) book contains 47 pages of Mayhew reminiscing about his involvement with IRD. His recollections were taped and edited by Lyn Smith, author in 1980 of one of the first big academic articles about IRD. One or two passages, for example on pp. 27 and 29, seem to me to show signs of Smith inserting material from that article. Much of the material will be familiar if you have ...

... .uk (Issue 19) May 1990 Last | Contents | Next Issue 19 In a Common Cause: the Anti-Communist Crusade in Britain 1945-60 Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsay A small section of this appeared in Lobster 12 . Although this is incomplete and under researched, we thought it worth putting out now. The origins of IRD 1947 saw the creation of the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD). It is generally accepted that IRD was the brain-child of the then Labour M.P . Christopher Mayhew, who had served in one of the 'secret armies' (The Phantoms) and the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the war. ...

... Hugh who? Robin Ramsay The man in the picture is the late Hugh Mooney, who died in December 2017.1 The announcement of his death2 describes him as 'Journalist, Diplomat, Barrister, Teacher and Writer'. (caps in the original) The interesting bit is 'diplomat'. Mooney worked for the Information Research Department (IRD), notably in Northern Ireland in the 1970s; and IRD was formally a section of the Foreign Office – hence 'diplomat'. Mooney was also part of the British Army's Information Policy Unit in Northern Ireland, the psy-ops outfit, as was Colin Wallace. The thing about bureaucracies is their procedures. When I was briefly ...